A study by researchers at St Andrews University using volunteers to translate ape gestures has determined that humans can understand the forms of communication used by wild chimpanzees and bonobos. The research suggests that the gestures the last common ancestor shared with chimpanzees used served as a foundation for human language.
The study has been published in the PLOS Biology journal. The lead researcher, Dr. Kirsty Graham from St Andrews University, stated that all great apes, including chimpanzees and bonobos, have a 95% overlap in the gestures they use for communication.
Human-Chimp Communication
Following the study, the researchers believe that the shared gesturing ability may have been present in our last common ancestor with chimpanzees and that this ability was a starting point for the development of human language. This study is part of a larger scientific endeavor to understand the origins of human language by examining the communication practices of our closest ape relatives. The research team has spent a significant amount of time observing wild chimpanzees and previously discovered that the great apes use a vast variety of over 80 gestures, each of which conveys a specific message to other group members.
The researchers in the study aimed to comprehend the meanings behind different gestures used by chimpanzees and bonobos. These gestures included a long scratching motion to indicate a desire for grooming, a mouth stroke to indicate a request for food, and tearing strips from a leaf with teeth as a gesture of flirtation. The researchers used video playback experiments to understand these gestures, a common method for testing language comprehension in non-human primates. However, in this study, they used the approach in reverse to evaluate human's abilities to understand the gestures used by their closest living ape relatives.
BBC stated that the participants watched videos of the apes gesturing and then chose from a multiple-choice list of translations. The participants performed better than expected, correctly interpreting the meaning of the ape gestures over 50% of the time. Dr. Catherine Hobaiter from St Andrews University stated that the results were surprising and that humans can instinctively understand gestures.
Chimps use a whole lexicon of gestures to convey messages like 'play with me' to other group members.
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Chimps' Exceptional Intelligence
The researcher mentioned that the study of the gestures used by chimpanzees and bonobos was both interesting from an evolutionary point of view and frustrating for scientists who have spent years training to study them. The researchers suggested that the gestures humans can intuitively understand may be part of a shared gesture vocabulary that evolved in ancient times across all great ape species, including humans.
It means that the gestures we can understand are limited to chimpanzees and bonobos and extended to all the great apes, including humans, which have been developed over time and passed on to us through evolution. According to Science Org, chimpanzees possess exceptional intelligence compared to other animals; they are skilled in using tools, have complex forms of communication, and are adept at solving problems.
However, despite their intelligence, their brainpower is still not as advanced as that of humans. Many factors contribute to the superiority of the human brain over that of chimpanzees, but recent research suggests that the ability of the human brain to develop more flexibly due to its looser genetic controls enables us to adapt and learn from our surroundings more easily than chimpanzees can.
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